Towards realization of an IoT environment: A real-life implementation of an IoT environment and its analytics

Abstract

Researchers have envisioned a plethora of theories, applications and usages for Internet-of-Things (IoT) where Active and Assisted Living (AAL) is identified as a necessity in today's world. With the technology standardization activities such as the Bluetooth V4.x (Bluetooth smart) have led to an explosive growth in innovative short-range wireless devices capable of providing various services to AAL. Allowing machine-to-machine (M2M) communication between these devices also presents new commercial service opportunities. Communication service providers, including telecom carriers, may need to establish new networks to accommodate M2M interactions and reinvent their business strategies. Typically, simple M2M or IoT devices need another capable device such as a smartphone to act as a gateway to the Internet to operate at their full potential. This paper investigates a novel IoT architecture in which any Internet-enabled device in the vicinity can act as an M2M gateway for IoT devices. This eliminates the need for the IoT device user to also own a smartphone or an Internet-enabled device to obtain services such as online-to-offline. This paper describes a novel IoT architecture test bed suitable for short-range wireless devices. The test bed's implementation, advantages/disadvantages and sample analytics from the gathered data from a real-life event are described with encouraging results.